Black Pepper Beef & Noodles

This is a quick-ish main course.  Most of my 'weekday dinners' take around 45min to cook and I do them from scratch but there are funny little tricks I've collected mostly by just tinkering.  This one is for my version of Black Pepper Beef.  It could easily be served with other noodles, white rice or possibly even as a pie filling.

Black Pepper Beef & Noodles

• 500g of good beef for frying (I regularly use Skirt Steak because it makes tender fillet-slices most of the time, but you could use other steak.  Most butchers will be happy to turn it into stir-fry type pieces, but I do this myself by slicing the skirt steak in half along the grain and then cutting the thin pieces across the grain)
• 1 fist-sized onion (This is cut in half against the rings, then you place the most recently cut surface face down and cut 'vertically' across the rings so you get pieces that will be about 4-5cm long and 1cm wide)
• 8 medium to large sized button mushrooms (I tend to slice mushrooms for most dishes)
• 1 large garlic clove (more if you want more of a kick to it)
• 1 tspn of beef stock powder
• A black pepper mill
• Soy Sauce
• Shao Xing Wine (Chinese rice-wine for cooking)
• A handful sized bundle of noodles (Most of the time I use soba noodles, but you could easily use almost any other kind of noodle and Hokkien or Thick Egg Noodles would do very well)
• Fresh coriander leaves/stems (depending on if you want to add its taste to the dish or if you want a nice kicker/garnishes)

1. Prepare the different ingredients and heat a good splash of oil in a wok.  I work on an electric stove, so its usually quite hard for me to get the oil smoking hot.  I tend to have this oil at the point where the onion will start frying and if you leave it rest it can get that sort of brown-blistering you get from oil frying.
2. Fry off the onion.  Don't worry if it goes a little brown, the caramelised tastes (and the smell) will be good later.
3. Put in the mushrooms.  Again, don't worry if you get a strong colouring on them, it all seems to work towards a nice half-way Chinese gravy taste.  They should still be a gentle grey colour, nowhere near that lovely thoroughly-cooked black colour mushrooms get.
4. Brown the beef.  I tend to have partly-thawed meat.  It seems to help with the gravy because the condensed water will end up in the dish but also the skirt steak seems to 'bleed' well into sauce.
5. While the beef is browning, bring a pot of water to the boil suitable for your noodles.  I tend to add a little kick into the noodles by adding a splash of soy sauce into the water particularly for soba.  It's surprising how that alternative 'saltiness' of the soy sauce makes the subtle difference.  There isn't more than 1 tbspn into the whole pot, the water will look dirty more than 'soy flavoured'.
6. When the beef is browned all over and has stopped obviously bleeding you should put in a good splash of Soy Sauce and Shao Xing.  (Both of them would be about 2 tblspns each).  Add in either grated garlic or diced garlic at this point.  Also add the stock powder here.
7. No more than 10min before you plan to serve this, take your pepper mill and put in a LOT of pepper.  If you want it to be very peppery I'd be suggesting something like 25 turns of your pepper mill.  When I tend to make this I'd say I put in something like 15-20 turns.

This tends to taste really good with something such as blanched green beans, blanched broccoli, blanched qing cai (Bok Choi) and carrot.  The green vegies seem to make a light counterpoint to the sometimes heaviness of the beef.